372 replies to this topic

[sirjordanncurtis]

That population boom is INSANE. lol the 1.5 year different of the colony is truly amazing.

[DaveJay]

It's a great read, just take it for granted that I like every post! On the phone the page refreshes when I "like" a post so I'm not going to rate each one.
Don't forget to keep us updated!

[Serafine]

Okay... this one is goign to be a real biggy...


First off, the Mid-August Update I for some reason forgot to post, starting with the setup map.






Lots of workers are running around in the outworld, doing their thing. The protein jelly (I think it's starberry) isn't really popular and has already been replaced by another one (presumably orange) that does seem to gather more attetion. Favorites are still bee brood, wet cat food (even the solid parts were carried away and fed to the brood this time) and the soup cat food (they're really licking the dish clean when I give this one).

The outworld tube outposts have become real satellite nests, in fact there's now brood in EVERY tube, even in outworld 4 at the other end of the setup around 3 meters away from the main nest (no idea how they got the brood to there). However there's going to be less pictures (maybe even none)of those satellite tubes in the future as it is becoming increasingly difficult to take pictures of those tubes without agitated ants running out of the open plastic containers.




















Unmengen von Brut auch in den Wasser-RGs der Nester.

Edited by Serafine, September 4 2018 - 3:56 AM.

[Serafine]

Part 2 of the Mid August update, nest pictures.





























Also my antkit stuff finally arrived - you may remember that almost 2 years ago when just after starting antkeeping I ordered some stuff from Antkit and about a week later their entire storage and the shop owners house burned down. Since the order was no longer fulfillable I chose to wait and after some time they decided to give people who were still waiting gift cards because many of the products from the original orders were no longer available. Well, after some difficulties (mostly trying to use the gift card but being unable to do so because their online shop was reworked while they were finding new ways to distibute their product through other sellers which gave them the breathing room required for actual production) I was finally able to redeem it and here's what I ordered:

[Serafine]

Now comes the real update, starting with the decorated Antkit arenas (the large ones are the PS 2000 and the smaller ones the PS 450).
If anyone is interested in my opinion of those (probably not but I'm gonna give it anyway^^) they look very clean and nice, their quality is solid (and the ports fit well), they're quite easy to decorate - their only downside is that they are pretty small (this is especially true for the PS 450 which are TINY).

 

[Serafine]

When the new arenas were finally dry (which took over 3 days) the time had come to plug all the stuff together. About an hour later this was the result.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Serafine, September 4 2018 - 4:21 AM.

[Serafine]

The ants really surprised me by how fast they occupied the new territories. It took them barely an hour for the first worker to reach the end of the new setup (the old outworld 4) and a day later there were already small packs of ants sitting around in every new place. The ants have now over 7.5 meters to walk around from their main nest to the entrance of the last outworld box and they seem to make use of all of it. There's no brood in the new tubes yet but that's only a matter of time.

 

 

 

 

 

And finally some new nest pictures (no nest water tube pictures, they look like they always do with tons of brood inside).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Serafine, September 4 2018 - 4:22 AM.

[DaveJay]

This is just getting scary now! Have you noticed people have started checking on you daily lately?

[Serafine]

Hu? There's no reason to do that. You can expect a regular update every 2-4 weeks (unless I somehow forget it obviously, like with the mid August update...) there's not really a point in weekly updates anymore, the colony has reached a size where it barely changes from week to week.

 

If you'd like to see more frequent updates you can join the Antkeeping Discord on which I post some pictures like once a week or so - those usually aren't worth a journal update (like work-in-progress pics of the Antkit arenas) or several of them get funneled into a single journal update

[DaveJay]

Sorry, just a joke that didn't land. I meant your loved ones checking to make sure you hadn't been eaten by the ants! Carry on

[sirjordanncurtis]

I can’t imagine what it would be like if you had to hibernate them :0
Tbh it’s crazy how neat ur setup is considering how large their enclosure is.

Edited by sirjordanncurtis, September 4 2018 - 8:20 AM.

[Serafine]

Sorry, just a joke that didn't land. I meant your loved ones checking to make sure you hadn't been eaten by the ants! Carry on

Lol, well I think my other half would quickly notice and call the police (aka more food for the ants).

 

Also I appearently managed the impossible anyway - the ants seem to be fed up for once. They didn't even take half of the cat food, of course they still emptied both sugar feeders within 3 days (which is a day longer than they usually take though).

[Serafine]

The last post is quite some while ago so this is going to be a big one...

Let's start with a few pictures of ants eating and drinking stuff.


Hier you can see nicely how the gaster of the workers becomes almost transparent after they drank a huge amount of diluted maple syrip.






Testwise I bought a box of mealworms and fed the pupae. They were grabbed quite quickly but the actual utilization was a bit lacking. I'd say they were deemed as "acceptable".



Minor is feeding major. There's now actually one to two majors standing guard at the feeders together with a group of smaller workers.




Here a bunch of workers were moving through the tubes as an actual group, usually they only travel alone or in pairs. It was quite cute how they constantly waited for each other and so the group moved in some weird sort of asynchronous stop-motion way as each worker stopped every few seconds and only continued to walk after being tapped on the back by the worker behind her.




They actually sealed their toilet spot. Not sure where the new poo dump is but I have suspicion (looks like the chose one of the other stones). It's really impressive how clean this ant species is.




And here a few more pictures of workers putting down different food insects, mostly locusts and crickets. They were exceptionally aggressive this tiime and for the first time showed actual teamwork, the crickets in particular were grabbed by several workers and pinned to the ground.












This is how it looks like when the feeders are completely occupied (usually hapens at night). Sometimes there's actual queues in front of the feeders.




They also got cat food soup but didn't take it as enthusiastic as usual (probably they were still full fom all those crickets and locusts they got earlier)

[Serafine]

A new outwold had been planned for quite some time and around 2 weeks ago it finally arrived.

First conceptual planing.




Looks delicous XD




The bottom layer is done. On the left side you can see how the rock is starting to soak up the water.




Two days later. The stone is completely soaked with water except for a tiny spot at the top, the shrimp tubes in the back are super wet as well.




Day 6, after excessive use of a heat lamp it's starting to dry slowly.




Day 7, just a few wet spots left.




The decoration stone and the plants just got a final makeover. After all had dried it was time to start disassembling the setup.




As a first step the Antkit Size 8 was disconnected and moved to the other side of the setup. After this was done (see picture below) the old Arena 2 (the plastic box on the top of the right side of the drawer) was cut out
as it sat in exactly the spot where the new tank would go. In the last step the old Arena three (the second plastic box located on the shelf) - it was destined to be retired as a leaking feeder and a garbage dump had made it quite messy.

Here is the old disconnected outworld 3.




The Antkit Size 8 and it's attached mini outworld in their new spot. In the background you can see the cotton-plugged port of another mini outworld which would later be connected with the old outworld 2 taking the place of the old outworld 3.




The "retirement center" at the far end of the setup got disconnected as well but those workers didn't even notice.




Not so much for the outworld though, it didn't take long for some aggitated workers to assemble there and starting to pull on the cotton.






The final new layout of the shelf part with the size 8 at the end, the mini outworlds in their old places and the old outworld 2 in the front.




Now came the interesting part - first the new tank was put on top of the drawer then three tubes full of ants had to be resettled from the old plastic box. In the end I just went for the pragmatic solution and put the entire plastic box into the new tank, added the frame with Fluon on top and relocated the tubes with just my bare hands - this had the nice side effect that all ants walking out of the plastic box automatically ended in up in the new outworld. After all the tubes were in place I just had to relocate a few workers that didn't manage to find a way out of the box on their own (hands and paper sheets worked well for that).

Some of the tubes were really FULL of ants, and not just in two dimensions.




All tubes in the new outworld. Now I can actually see how much brood they have inside.




The workers quickly saught shelter under the decorative resin rock.





Left behind was a pretty dirty plastic box which - after a proper cleaning - now lives a new life as a storage box.




Complete overview of the new setup.

[Serafine]

The main outworld is now visited quite well at night.












New eggs (again).




The main outwold tubes.






In the main nest the ants are doing the usual stuff. Interestingly there's almost no pupae right now.












But lots of small larvae.

[Serafine]

And finally a few pictures of the new (and the old) outworld.

Ants drinking maple syrup. Look at the worker next to the major XD







A filled major on it's way back to the main nest.




They got a piece of cooked chicken meat and it was quite popular. Locusts and crickets were taken well, too.








They are using the artificial plant spot as a hideout spot.




And they got a new hobby - chewing on the silicone sticking out from the corners of the new otuworld.




Diluted cat pastry seems to taste well but it's drying out really fast.

[Serafine]

Here comes the slightly delayed November update!

 

 

Can you dumb half a kilogramm of sand-clay mix into a tank full of ants?

Yes you can.

 

 

Of course they immediately started digging but didn't really get that far.

 

 

 

 

 

The amount of substrate they excavated is quite remarkable. So far they've dug ditches along the glass in three different places but no real chambers yet. I'm probably gonna add more substrate to the other front corner as they dug down to the bottom there as well but the substrate layer is way to thin to actually dig proper chambers.

 

 

 

There you cleaning up the tank and suddenly a worker decides to explore your hand...

 

 

This happens when you give Camponotus barbaricus boiled egg yolk. Nothing has been eaten as far as I can tell but that didn't keep them from spreading it all over the place.

 

 

Since they suddenly started to drink water from feeding dishes (they used to just not bother with water at all) they got two bird water feeder, one for each outworld (I also put cotton into the water basin by now).

 

 

Ant logic

 

 

A few arena pics. They are still active but drink way less that they used to, show limited interest in protein and barely have any pupae. They're definitely in diapause mode, heating cable has been turned off for four weeks as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The "retirement center" (the last box at the end of the setup) seems to be quite popular right now, no idea why.

Edited by Serafine, December 2 2018 - 4:52 AM.

[Serafine]

And here are a few nest pics. As you can see lots of larvae, very few pupae.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a very nice picture from early November.

 

 

Since ants (Myrmica rubra to be precise) have apparently passed the mirror test in a study from 2016 - this means they are capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror, an extremely rare ability that can only be found in the smartest animals on earth - I mounted a small mirror on the outside of their outworld and it does actually spark some interest (most of the time it gets ignored though).

 

Edited by Serafine, December 2 2018 - 8:35 AM.

[sirjordanncurtis]

Watch the larvae all start pupating and dab on hibernation. 

[Serafine]

Final 2018 update.


They have surprisingly good appetite for being in "hibernation". The waxworms seem to be very tasty.

















Roaches are taken as well but usually they only eat half of them before they dry out.







This is a very nice display of all the different worker colors.





Ants "sunbathing".









"I'm a honey pot! I'm a honey pot!"





Ants hanging out in the mini-arenas.